Trading keyboards are often used by financial professionals to enter and execute commands in a trading application. The financial professionals who use trading keyboards may use different keyboards extensively in their work and become accustomed to particular arrangements of the keys on the trading keyboards. The financial professionals may therefore develop different preferences for physical or functional arrangements of the keys. Therefore, a financial professional may be faced with an unfamiliar trading keyboard when, for example, using a different trading system or a change is made to the trading application implemented on a processor. Using an unfamiliar trading keyboard may lead to costly data entry mistakes by the financial professional. As a result, trades that were not intended may be processed and volumes of trading orders may be incorrectly executed. Conventional trading keyboards do not allow the financial professional to change the physical and/or functional arrangements of the keys therein.
Moreover, trading keyboards should accommodate all of the commands that may be associated with a trading application. However, if an individual key were assigned to each and every possible command, the trading keyboard would be large and unwieldy to use.
Therefore, there is a need for a trading keyboard in which the key arrangement may be physically configurable by a user.
There is also a need for a trading keyboard in which the key arrangement may be configurable by the user without implicating the trading application.
There is also a need for a trading keyboard in which the key arrangement is functionally configurable by the user such that each key of the keyboard may be associated with different commands in each configuration.